$99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android

"Utilite" has single- to quad-core Cortex-A9 chip and up to 512GB flash storage.

A new ARM-based Linux PC with a host of capabilities—including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and five USB ports—goes on sale next month starting at $99.

"Utilite," offered by Israeli company CompuLab, won't be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi, but the specs justify the cost. With dimensions of 5.3” × 3.9” × 0.8”, Utilite comes with a Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip with a single-, dual-, or quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor (which uses 3-8 watts of power). It will have up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory, up to 512GB of SSD storage, and a microSD slot allowing another 128GB.

CompuLab and its resellers will start accepting orders for the little computer in August. Full pricing wasn't announced, with CompuLab saying only that "Utilite will be offered in several configurations starting from $99."

Utilite is a follow-up to CompuLab's previous PC, the Nvidia Tegra 2-based Trim-Slice. That computer ranges in price from $213 to $338.

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So would this be able to run anything that the raspberry pi could since they are both ARM chips?

The RPi is based on a slightly weird ARM11 core(ARMv6 architecture; but with hard FPU), which is an older version of the instruction set than in the Cortex-A9. So, this board should be able to run anything the RPi can; but the reverse will not necessarily be true.

(Incidentally the Raspbian distro was cross-compiled on a Freescale chip quite similar to this one; because of the convenience of having a faster system that supported a superset of the RPi's capabilities, rather than doing an unbelievably glacial rebuild on RPis directly, or dealing with the headaches of doing a cross compilation on x86.)

Does anybody know anything about the "88MW8787" device, on the SDIO interface, that is providing 802.11N and BT?

Both the wired ethernet chips(the discrete intel and the Aetheros PHY) come up just fine; but a grand total of three hits for the wireless device, all mentions of this hardware no less.

With two 'real' GbE ports(on embedded, one PCIe, no USB adapter stuff here), up to 4GB of RAM, and enough flash to store an embedded OS, this thing could be a fairly mean network appliance; but only if support for things like AP mode, Promiscuous mode, etc. are available on the WLAN...

Does anybody know anything about the "88MW8787" device, on the SDIO interface, that is providing 802.11N and BT?

Both the wired ethernet chips(the discrete intel and the Aetheros PHY) come up just fine; but a grand total of three hits for the wireless device, all mentions of this hardware no less.

With two 'real' GbE ports(on embedded, one PCIe, no USB adapter stuff here), up to 4GB of RAM, and enough flash to store an embedded OS, this thing could be a fairly mean network appliance; but only if support for things like AP mode, Promiscuous mode, etc. are available on the WLAN...

So would this be able to run anything that the raspberry pi could since they are both ARM chips?

Not necessarily, given that one's ARMv6 and the other is ARMv7. Let alone anything on the Pi that used the exposed GPIOs/SPI/I2C busses.

XBMC? Probably yeah.

The i.MX6 is getting used in a lot of solutions, so this is nowhere near the first. Unfortunately the GPU will likely have closed source drivers, so you're bound to the Ubuntu/Android version that it comes with (assuming that the Ubuntu builds are even able to use the GPU.)

So would this be able to run anything that the raspberry pi could since they are both ARM chips?

The RPi is based on a slightly weird ARM11 core(ARMv6 architecture; but with hard FPU), which is an older version of the instruction set than in the Cortex-A9. So, this board should be able to run anything the RPi can; but the reverse will not necessarily be true.

(Incidentally the Raspbian distro was cross-compiled on a Freescale chip quite similar to this one; because of the convenience of having a faster system that supported a superset of the RPi's capabilities, rather than doing an unbelievably glacial rebuild on RPis directly, or dealing with the headaches of doing a cross compilation on x86.)

I'm about to put together a small system to get my data out of the "cloud" (for IMAP/SMTP, CalDAV/CardDAV for calendar and contacts syncing as well as data storage and maybe a photo gallery for the family). Up to now I was looking at a BeagleBone Black (which can run a "real" Linux like Debian or Ubuntu) but this thing sounds like it would fit the bill even better. It's a bit more expensive and draws more power though. Still.

With two 'real' GbE ports(on embedded, one PCIe, no USB adapter stuff here), up to 4GB of RAM, and enough flash to store an embedded OS, this thing could be a fairly mean network appliance; but only if support for things like AP mode, Promiscuous mode, etc. are available on the WLAN...

So true.

One of the biggest plusses I see to the ubiquitous ARM/mini appliance revolution is the ability to augment a home router with many additional features. Wifi routers do a lot of things pretty well, but advanced network trafficking (NAT, forwarding IP traffic, etc) are largely dependant upon the router's compatibility with 3rd party firmware.

It seems we're finally getting to the point where rolling your own network setup (getting a switch, router, wireless AP and a device like this as the brains) is becoming more and more financially feasible.

something like this might be a decent replacement for the r-pi i have running xbmc. It works ok, but its a bit slow to navigate menus, and anything pulling from the web (like video streaming plugins) are painfully slow. So if this is a decent amount faster, it might be a better option. Plus maybe running android or linux, i would be able to then stream netflix through it, something the pi can't do right now.

Wifi routers do a lot of things pretty well, but advanced network trafficking (NAT, forwarding IP traffic, etc) are largely dependant upon the router's compatibility with 3rd party firmware.

It seems we're finally getting to the point where rolling your own network setup (getting a switch, router, wireless AP and a device like this as the brains) is becoming more and more financially feasible.

Even compared to an AP with good OpenWRT support, this thing is substantially punchier than the average router(assuming that the wifi is, in fact, remotely usable for AP purposes). Even a relatively new router part is likely to be a fair bit weaker. Something like a BCM4708 is 2x 1GHz Cortex-A9s, and usually comes with 256MB of RAM in the 'enthusiast' early-release 802.11AC models.

If you wanted to do some futzing with Snort, or other fairly heavy packet-crunching, the difference between a quarter-gig of fixed BGAs and a 4GB SODIMM is going to be...considerable, and the extra CPU punch likely won't hurt, either.

So this could be a perfect little XBMC box for someone who doesn't want to build their own... And actually cheaper too! I'm really tempted to replace my no longer supported Boxee Box with this and put XBMC on it.

Does anybody know anything about the "88MW8787" device, on the SDIO interface, that is providing 802.11N and BT?

Both the wired ethernet chips(the discrete intel and the Aetheros PHY) come up just fine; but a grand total of three hits for the wireless device, all mentions of this hardware no less.

With two 'real' GbE ports(on embedded, one PCIe, no USB adapter stuff here), up to 4GB of RAM, and enough flash to store an embedded OS, this thing could be a fairly mean network appliance; but only if support for things like AP mode, Promiscuous mode, etc. are available on the WLAN...

I'm not 100%, but I believe it's either a typo and should be 88W8787, or it's a similar variant:

Not if you go with a NAS option instead considering the dual gigabit nics.

More expensive than a USB3 drive enclosure, I think. Given that internal storage is SSD and/or SD card only, I'd prefer to get a small (or none at all) internal SSD and rely on an attached external drive for bulk storage to keep costs down.

So this could be a perfect little XBMC box for someone who doesn't want to build their own... And actually cheaper too! I'm really tempted to replace my no longer supported Boxee Box with this and put XBMC on it.

I've used XBMC on my Raspberry Pi and while it functions it's not as quick and responsive as I would wish. It can be sluggish, something like an overloaded and underspec'd smart TV.

A device like this is presumably more capable of running XBMC and a welcome alternative to building a more expensive dedicated media PC. I hope Ars and CompuLab let Jon get his hands on it so we can get a decent review.

On the one hand, a device promising support of higher capacity components than are currently available makes a nice change from looking at a specsheet and wondering if XX really is the most it will work with; or just the most they could test with is a nice change. (And with dongles to let you plug a full size SD card into a uSD slot they could test 128GB compatibility.)

On the other hand because doing so is virtually non-existent my initial reaction was to go looking for a 128GB uSD card.

OK, the "starting at $99" and "single-, dual-, or quad-core ARM Cortex-A9" probably means that the $99 is for the minimal configuration and more decent specs will be considerably more expensive...

The BBB has a 1 GHz A8, 512 MB of RAM, micro-SD, USB, Ethernet and HDMI for $45, which is fine for a headless "server" and quite a bit cheaper. I could probably even distribute tasks over two or three or four of these if I have to. Still, things are getting really interesting on this side of the Intel/ARM divide!

I think it's pretty obvious that every one of the up to's won't be there in the base 99$ version so you are looking at single core, probably 512mb or 1gb of ram and 64 or 128gb storage. I also doubt the the onboard storage is actually a ssd and is probably actually just on board flash storage which will be significantly slower than a real SSD.

So this could be a perfect little XBMC box for someone who doesn't want to build their own... And actually cheaper too! I'm really tempted to replace my no longer supported Boxee Box with this and put XBMC on it.

If that's what you're interested in, I'd suggest looking into getting something like a Zotac ZBOX, and simply install OpenElec. You're looking at somewhere in the $275 USD range for everything, including an XBMC-compatable remote control.

That setup has the benefit of being able to run Windows too, if you choose.

Does anybody know anything about the "88MW8787" device, on the SDIO interface, that is providing 802.11N and BT?

Both the wired ethernet chips(the discrete intel and the Aetheros PHY) come up just fine; but a grand total of three hits for the wireless device, all mentions of this hardware no less.

With two 'real' GbE ports(on embedded, one PCIe, no USB adapter stuff here), up to 4GB of RAM, and enough flash to store an embedded OS, this thing could be a fairly mean network appliance; but only if support for things like AP mode, Promiscuous mode, etc. are available on the WLAN...

That is the mwifiex_sdio module, and does provide N/BT. The driver is fairly decent, but I have not personally attempted master mode with it. Last time I touched it was when I committed the 88MW8786 driver into 3.4.0

So this could be a perfect little XBMC box for someone who doesn't want to build their own... And actually cheaper too! I'm really tempted to replace my no longer supported Boxee Box with this and put XBMC on it.

If that's what you're interested in, I'd suggest looking into getting something like a Zotac ZBOX, and simply install OpenElec. You're looking at somewhere in the $275 USD range for everything, including an XBMC-compatable remote control.

That setup has the benefit of being able to run Windows too, if you choose.

I don't know about others, but minimal power-draw is important for me. At least for something I want to run 24/365. I've gone to LED lighting and tossed out basically all wimpy electric kitchen utensils and used less than 1000 kWh of electricity last year. It's not that I couldn't afford to buy more electrons than that, but there is something incredibly geeky and satisfying about minimizing this. Something like the BBB that draws 1-3 W just feels like good engineering.

And everything that is able to run Windows totally loses here almost by default.

I wonder about FreeBSD support? I'm a huge fan of pfSense, and if it could be ported onto this thing the specs/$99 price tag would make it a slam-dunk just about everywhere I go...

Just what I was thinking, if this can actually support near 1 Gbit line speeds on both ports. Not that I'll have anything near that running through it...but for those lucky enough to be able to get Google Fiber, this could be great for it.

I think it's pretty obvious that every one of the up to's won't be there in the base 99$ version so you are looking at single core, probably 512mb or 1gb of ram and 64 or 128gb storage. I also doubt the the onboard storage is actually a ssd and is probably actually just on board flash storage which will be significantly slower than a real SSD.

With storage going up to 512GB I doubt that very much. I also don't see any reason why on board flash should be any slower than a "real SSD". It definitely will be much faster than both micro-SD and USB2.